The Well of Stars (39 page)

Read The Well of Stars Online

Authors: Robert Reed

The cap-car wore a dozen burly coats of the finest hyperfiber, but the protection was far from adequate. “We’re being seared alive,” Osmium remarked, as they lifted into the blue-white glare. With gamma radiation punching its way through the armor and through their bodies, he told his companion, “We are cooking like a meal,” while his eating mouth made the rudest possible sound.
“Closer,” Pamir insisted.
Dying bones ached as they rose higher.
“Tracking now,” he said.
In any given nanosecond, the car knew its position to within the diameter of an iron nucleus, and its body was sprinkled with delicate lasers that were nearly as precise.
Whispery beams measured the outer edge of the Sword, while others mapped each of the black holes. An ocean of data was accumulated in moments. As the Sword cut deeper into the empty fuel tank, more of its surface lay exposed, stroked by light and memorized in withering detail. Another three cap-cars, similarly equipped and flying toward other vantage points, did the same relentless job. Harmonics were measured. Warps and points of strength were identified. The polypond’s weapon was stable but eroding. Elegant mathematical maps were built and tested, discarded and built all over again. In less than forty seconds, a single AI overseer—there wasn’t time for teams of machines or human involvement—decided that it could predict where the next region of greatest stability could be found, and it marked the nanosecond when its weapon could be unleashed. And then, finding itself with almost four seconds to wait, it decided to signal the captains, using a cheery voice to sing, “Hope.”
They were hovering thirty kilometers from the Sword’s superheated edge. Pamir’s body was dying, and his mind wasn’t far behind. He heard, “Hope,” and for a sloppy instant, he couldn’t remember the word’s significance. Hope for what? Turning to the harum-scarum, he meant to ask, but Osmium put a hard hand to his face, steering his eyes back to the main display.
A golden flash appeared below them.
Pamir remembered: A minor conduit led down into a useful loop, pristine and full of nothingness. The engineers and their robots had built a simple but powerful acceleration chamber inside that loop. Minutes ago, an object no bigger than a fist had been introduced—a sphere of hyperfiber adorned with immersion eyes and tiny thrusters, all laid over a sphere of iron and busy machines, which in turn covered another paper-thin sphere of hyperfiber. At the center of that was a highly charged, rapidly spinning black hole—the same tiny black hole that the fef had brought aeons ago as a gift to the captains. Smaller than a pinprick and containing the mass of
a small mountain, the hole was launched along a precise line, its velocity tweaked endless times during that microsecond ride toward its target.
Oblivious to the danger, the Sword continued to roll through the heart of the ship, cutting and consuming while its powerful frame absorbed every new stress and the cumulative damage.
One of its teeth emerged from the ripped stone above—a swollen but still tiny black hole held tightly in place—and the tooth passed above the captains’ last hope. They missed each other by five kilometers. A last course correction was attempted. To the brink of what was possible, the aim looked perfect. And then just before it struck the target, the black hole’s electrical charge was bled away, leaving it perfectly neutral.
At a fat fraction of lightspeed, the Sword was struck, a pinprick of nothingness diving into its very thin edge.
Human eyes were too slow to watch.
Nothing changed. As the cap-car descended, streaking for cover, Pamir saw the wild razor light continue to lengthen, cutting into the middle of the fuel tank. In the duration of a heartbeat, their weapon had already done all of its damage and left the ship behind, racing out into the Inkwell now, and eventually, escaping from the Milky Way. But even the most hopeful models predicted a delay of ten or twelve seconds. They had cut the Sword at its strongest point. Strength had a predictable flat surface. Far narrower than the hyperfiber ribbon, the black hole would burrow into its meat, leaving behind a channel of plasmas and empty space. As the black hole ate, it grew. As it grew in mass, the damage would increase, and a multitude of instabilities would rise and rise again.
Most models promised fifteen seconds, give or take.
The cap-car dove into an empty conduit, crush-webs grabbing at the burnt bodies inside.
Through tears, Pamir stared at the flickering images.
Fifteen seconds became twenty.
Became twenty-five.
No model predicted such a long wait. If the Sword could spin around once and again, showing no sign of catastrophic failure, then none would come. They hadn’t done enough damage. Improbable meant unlikely. Why did anyone bother to believe that they had a real chance at making this work?
A voice said, “Bad aim, it looks like …”
Washen.
There wasn’t time for a second shot. What they needed was a long stretch of empty space—a vacuum surrounded by known masses and predictable forces—and that had been lost The vast radiant blade continued to descend, slicing and carving until one of its awful teeth bit into the tank’s floor, ripping apart the place where the Submasters had gathered.
Where Washen had been.
Pamir called to her.
Silence.
The tube around him began to vibrate. He and Osmium were nearly ten kilometers from the cutting zone, and they were at risk. But of course, everything was ruined and doomed, and only habit caused Pamir to tell his companion, “We need to run some more.”
The harum-scarum laughed.
Then Washen’s voice dropped down on him. Through a nexus that was rapidly failing, she screamed, “No. Not this ship. No!”
She sounded like a furious, red-faced, and utterly powerless child.
In despair, she wailed, “Not my grandchildren! No—!”
Then every nexus failed; every sound became a perfect silence.
Pamir took control of the little car. He considered sloughing off the brutalized armor. But he thought again and started to move them deeper into the ship, following the conduit, pushing toward the closest pumping station.
Osmium continued to laugh with both of his mouths.
Pamir glanced his way.
Then a weak, sorry laugh leaked out of him, and Pamir started to say, “Quite the day—”
The cap-car slammed into a wall and halfway disintegrated. Shards of armor plating and engine parts flew ahead and fell to the floor of the little tube, and the car’s cabin fell on top of the wreckage and slid to a halt. And then again, with an even greater violence, the pieces picked up and moved.
Or the pieces were utterly still, and it was the ship that was moving.
Both answers presented themselves to Pamir, and then he wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
“Well, well. Life lurks behind those eyes, I see.”
The life behind the eyes slowly absorbed its surroundings. Tree limbs lay shattered and strewn about, white wood bleeding sap and the air stinking of sugary water and chlorophyll. Closer was a face. A human face, apparently. Perri slowly focused on the face, and after some groggy considerations, he decided that it was a human face, but not a normal one by most measures. Indeed, what was perhaps the oddest kind of creature was kneeling beside him, holding a rusty shovel in one hand, smiling happily with a face that was probably not much more than a hundred years old, and ancient beyond all measure.
The luddite gave his battered ribs a poke with the shovel. “Back to your wits yet, are you?”
Perri coughed, then admitted, “No.”
“You were looking for something here. Remember? Tracking some odd bug or worm or something … some species that owed you money, you told me … though I still don’t believe you, of course …”
“What happened?” Perri muttered.
“The hillside decided to join the valley floor.”
He dimly recalled the avalanche beginning—
“And you were carried along for the ride.” The ancient face had a bright, almost boyish grin. “Remember that?”
Perri had ridden into this obscure cavern inside a cap-car, yes. He recalled racing through, trying to beat the Sword before it cut the cavern in two. At the end, what he wanted was to return to his wife, to hold Quee Lee once more before the polypond either won or lost. And this was the only possible route—a deep cavern, isolated and happy because of its isolation. Its twin rivers fed into a sea that drained nowhere but up, offering a thousand routes leading to the ship’s upper reaches. To Quee Lee’s
front door, and home. But Perri had stopped for a few moments. Why? He had seen something, or something had seen him—
“We spoke,” he recalled. Dredging up pieces, he said, “I asked you about an alien.”
“You caught a whiff of something,” the worn face reminded him.
A biological cue, yes. An instrument riding on his car had inhaled a fleck of dust that triggered an alarm. Somewhere in the last one or two thousand years, a creature that may or may not have been an !eech had crossed this ground.
“You were looking for your bug,” the luddite said.
Perri nodded and weakly sat up.
“Whatever it was … you thought it might have climbed up that wall, into one of the Old Caves …”
“It hadn’t,” he replied. Then with a sad shake of the head, Perri added, “It was a spurious trace. My machine’s fault, and mine.”
“I don’t trust machines myself.” Something about that statement was terribly humorous. The old boy threw down his shovel and laughed for a long while, stopping only when Perri had recovered enough to stand on his own.
“The Sword’s already gone past,” Perri observed.
“While you were coming out of the Caves, yes.”
“Is that what started the avalanche?”
“Hardly.”
Off in the remote distance, the cavern came to an abrupt end. A strong glassy wall stood where there should be nothing but bright air and white clouds. The Sword’s fantastic motion and the wild energies had created an alloy of molten hyperfiber and gaseous rock. What remained could be kilometers thick, chaotic and impermeable and very tough. The new wall looked cold and rigid, but distances were misleading. Perri assumed that the Sword was now slicing into Marrow, reaching for whatever lay at its
core, that irresistible marriage of purpose and fire carving out the heart of the ship.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“Did that machine pass?”
“A few minutes?”
Another laugh filled the air. “No, no. It’s been ages longer than that. You were dead ten different ways, and I found you and unburied you, and now I’ve been watching your goo turn back to fake flesh—”
“How long?”
“Thirty hours, nearly.”
Perri didn’t know what to say.
But his savior could guess the next questions. With a nod and a yellowy grin, he explained, “Someone managed to turn the Sword at the last moment. The captains, or somebody convinced that damned machine to twist sideways and miss the core, cutting its way out the trailing hemisphere and off into space somewhere. To die, we can hope.”
Washen had done it, thought Perri. Against very long odds, she had managed to save the Great Ship.
He said as much, almost cheering.
The luddite preferred amused silence.
For the first time, Perri tried to walk.
His savior watched him and smiled, and after Perri’s first careful steps, he asked, “Anything feel a little odd?”
“Everything does,” Perri replied.
Then he hesitated. “What am I supposed to feel?”
“‘Every man is as heavy as his burdens,’” the man sang out, quoting some old luddite text.
“What do you mean? My weight?” Perri bent his new knees and then stood again. Then he stared at jumbled rocks and the raw, exposed hillside, and with a building astonishment, he asked, “What triggered the avalanche?”
“The ship.”
“How?”
“Well, the whole great gal was moving.” The old face
broke into a wild, raucous laugh. “Like never before, the ship shook and twisted, and quite a bit more than that, too …”
Perri considered the words.
“‘Every man is as heavy as his burdens,’” the man repeated. “After the shaking stopped, something about this world felt different, and I wanted to know what. may be a primitive man, but I’m not stupid. It only took me a full day and a hundred tests to decipher—”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything has grown heavier,” the luddite proclaimed “I’ve checked my conclusion on three scales, testing my own body as well as known masses. Over the course of the last thirty hours, I have become more robust by a little less than half a kilogram.”
“What do you mean?” Perri sputtered.
Then, “I don’t believe you.”
The luddite took no offense. With a shrug and a big wink, he simply said, “But that makes perfect sense. If this ship of ours is accelerating now.”
Accelerating how? The engines were dead, and the ship was sliced into two pieces, and Perri hadn’t heard so much as a hum out of any of his waiting nexuses since he came back to the living—
Oh, shit.
He dropped to his knees, as if struck in the belly.
“I’m not the oldest fellow in the world,” his companion admitted “And I’m not the brightest by a long ways. But judging by the evidence, I’d say … and with a certain amount of confidence … that after a very long sleep, the Great Ship has found her true engines, and she is once again, at long last, under way … !”
 
O’Layle sought her out, and with a mixture of astonishment and giddy pleasure, he reported, “The guards are talking about leaving. And they might leave the doors open for us, unless they do not. In either case, I think we can slip out before long.”
Mere nodded.
“You look well,” he lied.
She still had only a mortal body repaired in haste, and she remained far from healthy Rebuilding her immortal genes would take patience and talent, neither of which she had at her disposal just now.
“What’s wrong?” her companion inquired.
Mere stared at him with huge wise eyes.
“We weren’t obliterated by the polypond,” O’Layle reminded her. “We beat the creature in the end—”
“And she is sitting on our hull still.”
“And here we are, still completely alive. Which is why I don’t see the need for gloom.”
“The ship is accelerating,” she replied.
“Slowly” he countered.
But at a considerably faster rate than anything known before. Mere could have told him that much, and she could have spoken for days about the consequences of this one unexpected event. Even at their best, the Great Ship’s engines were weaklings next to this kind of energy production. But then again, maybe what they had always considered to be the engines were nothing more than maneuvering rockets. Had anyone ever bothered to wonder—?
“The ship still functions,” O’Layle continued. “We have good air and clean water, which is a testament to the machine’s capacity to endure.” Then he threw out his chest, adding, “We both know something about enduring, I think.”
Mere was weak. When she stood up, as she did now, she could feel the slight but insistent tug that was trying to pull her sideways. It occurred to her that this was as much acceleration as the ship could endure without disrupting lives and the flow of vital fluids. Gravity still dominated, but those inside the leading face would feel heavier than before. Those under the trailing face would feel lighter. And those like her, standing near one of the ports, would feel a delicate hand always shoving them sideways.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
O’Layle laughed at her.
“But there is a better question,” he warned.
Mere looked down. In her hand, slick and a little heavy, was the timepiece that Washen had slipped to her. Just a few days ago, it happened. Yet the event seemed very distant now, while a million other, far better days felt as if they had ended just half a moment ago.
“Who is in charge now?” she asked.
“Precisely” he gushed.
Mere looked up. She breathed in and held the breath, and after a long moment, she asked, “Have you seen any captains?”
“Not one.”
“Who then?”
“No one. Myself, I have only seen our guards.”
“Tell me.”
He had to smile, enjoying the suspense. Then with a little tip of the head, O’Layle told her, “They are being spotted, here and there. Back from extinction, and looking the place over, I’d imagine. Now that they’re the ones in charge—”
“Who?”
“They haven’t given a name yet,” he admitted. “But then, the !eech were never the most outspoken of souls.”
Mere absorbed the news.
“But isn’t that the best news?” O’Layle had to ask. “You and I … we know this species, and we have worked well with them, in the past … and probably in the future too, I would think …”
A narrow finger opened the silver lid of the timepiece, great brown eyes staring at the moving arms and silent numbers. Then after another little while, Mere put on a smile, and she lifted her gaze, and quietly she said, “So tell me. How exactly can we slip out and away?”
 
“Contingencies,” Pamir said. Then with a rumbling tone, he added, “Two centuries of making ready modeling and
planning, and we still didn’t imagine anything quite like this.”
His companion refused to respond.
No matter. He led her down the hallway, on foot, watching the back of one of Osmium’s favorite sons. It was only the three of them slipping into Port Alpha. The rest of the security team were elsewhere, making their presence obvious. At a juncture with another hallway, they paused. No one else was visible. Two sealed doors and a hundred meters of open floor were all that remained between him and his goal now.

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